your missing the point maybe I am not saying that the theme should not be included. I am saying that we should maintain its own development project and include the stable version of that in the main phpbb project.

nickvergessen wrote:It makes no sense to move it to a separate project as most patches require backend and front-end changes.

Only in the confines of an existing theme! There will be a lot of changes/pulls/bugs with a new theme which deal solely with the HTML/CSS/JS

No because I do not develop a theme to fit a back-end! If its truly abstracted I would develop a theme to meet the needs of the content/UX/UI. Then turn around and make sure the backend has everything I need.

Look I am completely open to suggestion on how best to handle this.

The main problems with the current way that I have are as follows.

1. The concept of development vs production themes. A development version of the theme somehow needs to be maintained. I can elaborate more on this if need be.
2. The current method of tracking the development and progression of the theme is diluted in the confines of the entire projects scope. It is not easy to only see/track changes,bugs,issues only related to the HTML/CSS/JS layer
3. Their are several resources that are required for development on the front-side that we may not want to ship but should be maintained within the confines of the theme. Add these to the already complex directory structure of phpbb along with a more suited development break-out of content and your file base can become astronomical.
4. Currently if their is a bug or issue with the theme that might be an easy fix we have to either wait for a completely new release of phpbb to publish said fix. When dealing with the front-end these can pile up fairly quickly.
5. A change that only affects the front-end with no changes to the back-end is not easily understood for those testing/developing since they usually get merge with unrelated merges of back-end changes.

If you have suggestions on how to resolve these without some sort of separation I am open to them.

But in phpBB all the features (almost) are related to a front-end and a front-end is always related to a backend. So who will create and update the templates? And in which order should the PR be merged? The style first (will not compile because the vars aren't available) or the back-end (will not compile too because the template file will not be available)? Or you aren't talking about the templates? In this case it make no sense to have css in a project and the HTML in another, they are related.

Nicofuma wrote:But in phpBB all the features (almost) are related to a front-end and a front-end is always related to a backend. So who will create and update the templates? And in which order should the PR be merged? The style first (will not compile because the vars aren't available) or the back-end (will not compile too because the template file will not be available)? Or you aren't talking about the templates? In this case it make no sense to have css in a project and the HTML in another, they are related.

The front-end testing does not really ever fail since css/less does not require the backend. And Html renders regardless you just see the temp vars. The backend is the only issue, the changes could just be pulled in from the template with their merge if you link the repositories. Just a suggestion though

brunoais wrote:@hanakin
Question:
How do I execute functional tests on travis if the theme is on a completely different project?

Not the best person to address that I am not really fully familiar with travis

point is not weather its going to happen that point is something needs to be done to attempt to fix some if not all of these issues

hanakin wrote:
1. The concept of development vs production themes. A development version of the theme somehow needs to be maintained. I can elaborate more on this if need be.
2. The current method of tracking the development and progression of the theme is diluted in the confines of the entire projects scope. It is not easy to only see/track changes,bugs,issues only related to the HTML/CSS/JS layer
3. Their are several resources that are required for development on the front-side that we may not want to ship but should be maintained within the confines of the theme. Add these to the already complex directory structure of phpbb along with a more suited development break-out of content and your file base can become astronomical.
4. Currently if their is a bug or issue with the theme that might be an easy fix we have to either wait for a completely new release of phpbb to publish said fix. When dealing with the front-end these can pile up fairly quickly.
5. A change that only affects the front-end with no changes to the back-end is not easily understood for those testing/developing since they usually get merge with unrelated merges of back-end changes.

If you have suggestions on how to resolve these without some sort of separation I am open to them.